My Trip to Eastern Europe - Part 2

The second day of my trip was going to be a tough day emotionally.  When I got up the morning we were headed to Auschwitz-Birkenau I felt a real sense of foreboding.  Even though I had read so much about the Holocaust, visited both the U.S. Holocaust Museum and Yad Vashem, I wasn’t sure if I could handle walking in the footsteps of so many of my ancestors.  I was sure that my emotions would take over my rationality.  I wrote these words when I got back to my hotel that evening.  But I am sure that they in no way truly represent the entirety of my feelings.  As I look back, I now know I’ll never find the right words to describe what Auschwitz is and what it represents to the world.

Before you read on, I want to make sure that anyone who reads these notes about my visit understand the basic layout of the camp.  The camp is actually broken up into three sections.  The first (Auschwitz I) was built by the Nazis, used as headquarters for the SS and for the first experiments and murders.  It is now a Museum. This camp held around 16,000 prisoners at a time.  The second and by far largest camp (Auschwitz II-Birkenau) is located about 2 miles away from Auschwitz I.  This camp is where millions of people were killed in the  gas chambers and from inhuman living conditions and their bodies cremated.  The camp held more than 90,000 prisoners at a time of which 68% were Jews.  While the numbers are not easily determined more than 1.5 million people (90% Jewish) were exterminated at Birkenau.  The third camp and one we would not visit was Monowitz (or Buna).  This camp was mainly a labor camp and is now completely destroyed.  The camp held around 12,000 prisoners, including Italian survivor Primo Levi who wrote the book Survival In Auschwitz (If This Is A Man) in 1947.

Tuesday October 9, 2018 – Krakow, Poland and Auschwitz-Birkenau

Our plan was to leave early in the morning for our bus ride out to Auschwitz.  I got up extra early to get in a training run.  Plus I figured I needed to get myself mentally prepared for the day.  I find that a run always clears my head allowing me to enter the day ready to handle anything that is brought my way.  I planned to run 3.1 miles along the Vistula River.  It was very dark and quiet.  I only saw a couple of people running and biking along the path.  It was mostly cloudy and a crisp 49 degrees.  I ran 3.1 miles exactly in 28:29 (9:12 pace).  After a short recovery walk, I headed into the hotel to get ready for the day’s journey.  I had no idea what I was going to see or feel as I got ready to meet the rest of the group.

We got onto the bus for the drive out to Auschwitz.  As we left the city limits, we were greeted by a clear sunny sky.  I thought to myself that we were about to visit a place where millions of people were exterminated and a sunny day seemed wrong.  As we approached the site, the sun disappeared and a fog started to thicken and the clouds came in.  It was a bit eerie.  The change in the weather was a bit foreboding.  We exited the bus and headed to the entrance where we had to go through a metal detector.  Auschwitz doesn’t allow private guides, so we met our guide Szymon who would lead us through the camp.

My first impressions of the camp were that it was full of brick barracks buildings which I did not expect. Every picture, movie and television show has the buildings depicted as wooden shacks.  It was a bit surreal.  As we started walking from the entrance I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.  With the exception of the electric fences the brick buildings and neat streets did not belie the fact that so many atrocities occurred at this place.  In fact, I thought that it actually looked a little like a nice small Polish town.  What is interesting is that except for the trees and grass that has since grown here, the

camp has been left almost untouched.  According to Szymon it is just like it looked when the Nazi left in January 1945.  Today most of the blocks have been turned into a Museum.

We learned that the original buildings were actually an old Polish army barracks that were repurposed.  During the camp’s construction, nearby factories were appropriated and all those living in the area were forcibly ejected from their homes, which were bulldozed by the Nazis.  Obviously this was to hide what was happening from the nearby residents.  Szymon explained that Auschwitz was originally to be used simply as a detention center for the many Polish citizens arrested after Germany annexed Poland in 1939.  The prisoners would initially include anti-Nazi activists, politicians, resistance members and people from the cultural and scientific communities of Poland.  However, when the Final Solution became the official Nazi policy, Auschwitz became the ideal death camp to carry out their heinous plan.  The reason was that Auschwitz was near the center of all German-occupied countries on the European continent.  Plus it was in close proximity to the rail lines used to transport the victims to the various concentration camps.  As we walked towards the most famous sign in the camp, I was struck by how peaceful and beautiful the surroundings were despite the knowledge of what happened there.

Total madness, right?  It was when I saw the infamous sign “ ARBEIT MACH FREIT” – Work will set you free that I finally knew where I was standing and a chill came over me.

The museum is a path where each block building number has been given a particular name to identify the horrors that took place during the Holocaust with pictures, signs and panels telling the story of what happened there.  Szymon would bring us into a building where we would see the museum displays.  Each building got progressively worse as we learned more about what happened here in graphic detail.  I noted that whenever Szymon spoke about the beginning of the camp he stressed that the original prisoners were Polish political prisoners some of whom were Jews.  I wondered whether or not that this was because of Poland’s Holocaust Law that states that it is illegal to accuse the Polish nation of complicity in the Holocaust.  Regardless, he still did not spare us any details about the atrocities.

I have visited both Yad Vashem and the US Holocaust Museum and seen the piles of shoes, suitcases, etc.  But this time I was seeing the detritus of these poor souls in the place where it happened.  These rooms were the hardest to visit.  I found myself staring in disbelief.  You notice the small shoes amongst the many piled there.  An overwhelming sense of loss and sadness welled up inside me.   I tried to imagine that child who’s life was taken too early for no reason at all.  But I couldn’t find him or her.  I realized that this is why we visit Auschwitz – to become a witness for the witnesses.

It took so much will on my part not to breakdown and simply sob as I continued to the room filled with the suitcases.   You see that each one has a name and a date on it.  There they were all piled together each silently telling a story of a family torn apart and lost to us.  Of course I couldn’t help but think about  the lies the Nazis told the prisoners as they arrived into the camp.  Standing there looking them in the eye and assuring them that they would get their belongings back after they had taken a shower.  I tried to understand how one human could do that another.  But sadly there is absolutely no human logic to it.

In my life I have read many books that had dramatic effects on me over the years.  This was because I could imagine and picture to a certain degree the feelings that the victims felt at the time.  But this time and at that place seeing the real evidence left me speechless.  So I gave into my emotions and let the tears fall.

The final blow that had pushed me over the edge was when I walked into the room filled with the hair of the victims.  Szymon told us that it represented 40,000 people in this one small room.  You could still see all of the different hair colors, course, thin, curly, straight, etc.  Standing there and seeing this was so hard.  Plus we had just been told that the Nazis had sold the hair to fabric manufacturers made me sick.  The hair was used to produce socks and carpets.  There are no words to describe the deep disgust, sadness and frankly hatred I was feeling at that moment.

We then had a chance to go into a new exhibition created in conjunction with Yad Vashem located in Block 27.  It says:

“Open your heart, visitor. And your mind. And your soul. As you walk through the exhibition "SHOAH" and are enveloped by the sights and sounds of the past, hear the voices of the victims, see the drawings of the children, touch the names of the murdered. Be this place's messenger. Take with you a message that only the dead can still give the living: that of remembrance.” - Elie Wiesel

It was an incredible exhibit.  The room that almost brought me to tears again was the children’s room where they had recreated drawings on the walls depicting what the children drew depicting what they saw around them.  The drawings were copied fragments of the originals drawn in a pencil, exactly as they were, onto the walls of the room dedicated to the children.  We all know that children will draw on whatever they can – even on the walls surrounding them.  According to the exhibit these drawings were drawn on a scale of 1:1.  As you walk around the room the drawings drawn at the height a child would have drawn encircle you creating a powerful message giving voice to the children who perished.  So moving.

We then had a chance to see some video of survivors telling their story before going to the final stop in a room that contained books hanging on a rack.  One of Yad Vashem's central missions is to collect the name of each and every individual victim.  According to Hillel, Yad Vashem has been collecting these names for over 60 years.  The result is that they have 4.2 million names of the 6 million Jews murdered so far.  The "Book of Names" shows the name, birth date, home town and place of death for each victim.  There are 58 volumes of 140 pages each with 500 names per page.  Here in one place you can see and read the immeasurable loss of the Jewish people and ultimately to humanity.

I thought I should take a moment and look at the book to see if there were any Frumkins there.  I found the book with the list of names beginning with “F”.  I figured there might be a couple of Frumkins listed.  So I wasn’t surprised to find the first names in the book on the bottom of the page.  What totally threw me for a loop was when I turned to the next page and it was filled top to bottom with Frumkins.  There they were 500 Frumkins all who were killed unmercifully by the Nazis.  I had no idea how many of these names were my direct descendants.  But I felt an enormous sense of permanent loss.   I had to sit down for a few minutes to try and process my feelings before we headed to the last stop on the tour.

The last stop was at the gas chamber/crematorium at Auschwitz I.  As I walked into the gas chamber I had the most uneasy feeling.  This huge gas chamber could contain a maximum of about 800 people.  When the gas chamber was filled with victims, the gas-tight door was closed and bolted, and the SS doctor on duty gave the order to insert the poison gas.   After 5-10 minutes death by suffocation usually occurred.  When I looked up, I could see the holes the Nazis had dropped the Zyklon B through to kill their victims.  It sent chills down my spine.  Through a door on the left we walked into the room with the reconstructed ovens.  The ceiling in the room was black from soot.  I simply couldn’t stay in the room for more than a few seconds.  I felt nervous, scared, mad and sad all at the same time.

We then headed out to the exit where we would meet our bus.   As I sit here just a few hours after leaving Auschwitz, I still can’t describe the alienating feelings and the overall numbness I am feeling.   I realize now that nothing could have prepared me for this experience.  While I will try to tell those who ask what it was like, I truly believe that no one can really understand what I was feeling as I left Auschwitz I.  I will tell them that the only way to truly understand is to experience it first hand and then they will understand how difficult it is explaining how it affects you.  I felt all the emotions as I walked through the camp.  I was numb, sad, detached, mad, frustrated, speechless all at the same time.  I kept coming back to the thought that I came here to pay my respects to the victims and to be aware of what human beings are capable of doing to each other.  And I couldn’t leave without remembering the words of George Santayana “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

We headed from Auschwitz I to Auschwitz II (Birkenau).  As the bus approached the site the sun finally came out.  As I said earlier, a bright sunny day felt wrong.  But at the same time, I thought it would not allow anything to hide in shadow.  The entire camp would be laid out before us and we would be able to see every detail.  We could see the size of the camp as we pulled into the parking lot.  My first reaction was that it was so much larger than I expected.  The other thing was that there is not much left standing.    As we got off the bus and looked towards the front of Birkenau, I finally actually felt cold inside.  It was a very strange feeling standing there in the bright sun and feeling cold.

Hillel suggested that we walk silently into the camp through the main gate before we even started discussing anything.  I cannot find the words to explain the great sense of loss and sadness I felt as I surveyed the area.  We were standing on the ground where so many of my fellow Jews got off of the transports and their fate was decided.  We, of course, know the end of their story.  Yet I cannot fathom what they were thinking as they descended the transport and were separated from their families many never to be together again.  It was a truly sobering experience standing there. 

When we reached the entrance gate, I realized immediately that wherever I looked, all I could see were countless identical barracks on the left and almost none on my right.  On the right it seemed to go on forever.  The site was massive.  I stood there in the middle of the rail lines surrounded by destroyed barracks where only the remaining chimneys could be seen and feeling completely alone despite the fact that there were people all around me.  No words or tears.  Just a deep sense of emptiness.

We left the entrance gate and started walking to the back of the camp.  There is a historic train car that has been placed at the ramp or unloading platform where beginning in the spring of 1944, Jews deported to Auschwitz by the Germans disembarked and underwent selection by SS doctors there.  They were ordered to form lines to prepare themselves for the selection process.  It was here that the Nazis selected which Jews would be sent straight to their deaths in the gas chambers and which Jews would remain alive - temporarily.  As we know, more than 80 percent of those who arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau were immediately murdered.  The majority of the remainder died as a result of overwork, mistreatment, disease or lack of food.  It was here that I felt the first sense of the souls of the victims.

As we walked on there was only empty spaces and the rails.  We finally stopped at a dead end on the far western end of the camp where the main crematoriums and gas chambers were built.  They of course were destroyed by the Nazis in an attempt to cover the evidence of their atrocities.  There between the ruins of the two largest gas chambers and crematoria (Krema II and Krema III) is the International Monument.  The Monument sits at the end of the railroad tracks which were built in April 1944 to bring the Jews to the western end of the Birkenau camp where they disembarked near the gas chambers making their deaths more efficient.  At this place those selected for immediate death were walked directly to the Krema II and Krema III gas chambers that were on either side of the tracks.  Those who were selected to work walked down the road behind the Monument to the Sauna where they took a real shower and were given their striped uniforms to wear.

The monument itself is quite large with a jumble of dark stones that to me looked like grave stones.  Hillel told us that they actually were meant to resemble the victims.  I couldn’t see it.  I walked along the front of the Monument and could see the row of granite slabs, each with a metal plate on top which has an inscription in a different language, including Yiddish, English, and every major language of Europe. I found the granite slab inscribed with English words on the far right of the Monument, as you face it.  The inscription reads:

Forever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity, where the Nazis murdered about one and a half million men, women and children mainly Jews from various countries of Europe.   AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU 1940-1945

We then went over to the gas chamber/Krema II which is left in the same condition the Nazis left it in when they were trying to destroy the evidence.  As we walked around the ruins, we came upon 4 stone markers that were placed in front of a pond.  Here is what is written on the stones in English, “To the memory of the men, women and children who fell to the Nazi genocide.  Here lie their ashes.  May they Rest In Peace.”  Hillel explained that this is known as the ash pit of Krema II.  The ash pit contains the ashes from the crematory ovens in Krema II.

There is no way to know how many Jews ashes were disposed of in this place.  I have still not processed my feelings from seeing this site.  I stood there looking at that pit, that silent land and thought that nothing made sense any more.  I knew what happened there but standing on the spot some 70 years later, I suddenly didn’t want to believe that it really happened.   Yet in this peaceful place there are no traces of the atrocities that occurred there.  

My Temple brethren and I held a memorial service at this place.  We lit 6 yahrzeit candles which each represented 1,000,000 of the 6,000,000 Jews who were killed in the Holocaust.  The first reading helped me to remember why I have wanted to visit this place for so long.  It was written by Elie Wiesel,

Memory
Remembering is a noble and necessary act.  The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history.  No commandment figures so frequently, so insistently, in the Bible.  It is incumbent upon us to remember the good we have received, and the evil we have suffered…How are we to reconcile our supreme duty towards memory with the need to forget that is essential to life?  NO generation has had to confront this paradox with such urgency.  The survivors wanted to communicate everything to the living: the victim’s solitude and sorrow, the tears of mothers driven to madness, the prayers of the doomed beneath a fiery sky.

For us, forgetting was never an option.

I read to myself these words, “One hole in the net and you slipped through?  I couldn’t be more shocked or speechless.  Listen, how your heart pounds inside me.”  All I could think of was that but for the grace of God, go I.  I too, like these nameless victims, might have suffered a similar fate, but for God's mercy.  “May the memories of all who suffered at the hands of the Nazis be sanctified with joy and love.  May their souls be bound up in the bond of life, a living blessing in our midst.”  I feel blessed to have had a chance to say Kaddish for those who have no one left to say it for them. 

Our last stop was one of the last standing women’s barracks.  I went into the building not sure what to expect.  It had a dirt floor and bunks that were just wooden slats.  The barracks were spot clean except for the dirt floor.  As I stood there in the barracks I just couldn’t sense the evil nor the pain and suffering. Then it dawned on me the people who lived and died in here didn’t leave any trace of human feelings. They had been de-humanized so deeply that they simply couldn’t leave a trace of humanity behind.  I don’t know how any of them could have survived.  It left a lasting impression on me.

Before we left this spot, Hillel wanted to tell us a redeeming story of hope.  It is the story of Angela Polger whose mother Vera Bein arrived at Birkenau May 25, 1944 and was 2 months pregnant.  Somehow she was able to get through the selection process, survive the hard work and even being used as a guinea pig for sterilization experiments.  Somehow she gave birth to Angela on December 21.  Her fellow inmates helped Vera hide her baby and a little over 1 month later they were liberated by the Soviet Army.  Angela was even lucky enough to get official proof of her arrival in this world: a birth certificate that her adoptive father got for her before the family left Poland.  Prepared in 1945 in Oswiecim, the Polish name for Auschwitz, the certificate gave her name as "Angela Bein." The surname was that of her biological father, Tibor Bein, a lawyer, who died of maltreatment in the camp.   She even has a copy of her birth certificate, issued in 1989 by the Communist authorities in her hometown, Sarospatak, Hungary.  It was a really uplifting story to end a very emotional day.

We had lunch in the town next to Auschwitz – Oswiecim where there are no Jews left.  The last Jew to live in the town was Shimshon Krueger who died at 72 in 2000.   But there is an active synagogue there known as the Osweicim Synagogue.  It was built in 1918.  Next to it where we had lunch is a Jewish center, museum and cultural center dedicated to Jewish heritage and reconciliation. The center is located in Krueger’s home and opened in 2013.   This gave me hope that the Jews of Poland will never be forgotten.

After a little rest, we headed over to the Krakow JCC to have dinner with them.  It was nice to see that despite all of the tragedy and 90% of Polish Jewry being destroyed that there is still a spark of Yiddishkeit growing again in a place that Jews had lived for over 1,000 years before the war came to Poland.

Tomorrow we head to Warsaw for the next stop on our journey.

As I sit here almost a month since my visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, I am still haunted by the  thoughts of the desolated railway line that brought the men, women and children to their end.  I still find it very hard to express in words what I felt at Auschwitz-Birkenau.  But the feelings are with me.  In time I will be able to find the words to be able to bear witness to the pain, the suffering, the hunger and the emptiness of the people who died there.  I wanted to visit this place to be able to feel a connection and to better understand.  I wanted to pay a tribute to my people who fought for their life every single day.  Upon reflection there is nothing that will ever allow me to truly understand how this could have happened at all. 

Auschwitz-Birkenau is definitely a tough place to visit whether you are Jewish or not.  But it’s critical that we do so to keep the memory alive.  We must visit to allow us learn from the past and to stay alert as similar things are still happening today.  Pittsburg was only a recent incident against the Jewish people.  Jews make up about 2 percent of the U.S. population.  But statistics say that Jewish Americans account for more than half of the hate crimes committed due to religious bias.  The Anti-Defamation League identified 1,986 anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. in 2017, up from 1,267 in 2016 along with a major increase in anti-Semitic online harassment.  Hatred of the other never goes away completely.  We must remain diligent in pointing out hateful words especially our President’s that are contributing to the rise of the anti-Semitic and intolerant sentiments in our country.

I believe that my visit happened at the perfect time in my life and where we are as Jews in our history.  It could happen again.  But if more people like me were to visit and learn about the past atrocities, about the escalation of hatred, about the culmination of persecution, then perhaps the rhetoric would change in our politics.  My hope is that the lessons taught by a visit to a place of such deep evil and hatred would help us better guard against repeating the mistakes of our past.  I know that for the rest of my life, I will never forget that day in Poland.

Am Yisrael Chai  עם ישראל חי (The People of Israel are alive!)

Oct 31 – 6.30 miles (53:37, 8:31 pace) – Speed Work

Nov 1 – 7.20 miles (1:06:13, 9:12 pace)

Nov 2 – 7.20 miles (1:03:16, 8:47 pace)  – Tempo Run

Nov 3 – 10.10 miles (1:35:55, 9:30 pace)

Total Miles:  30.8 miles

2018 Total Miles:  1,580.5 miles